It would be difficult to find a child in America today with Polio or Rickets, but back when these three NFL legends were growing up, it was commonplace. These childhood illnesses are easily preventable, and in the case of rickets, they are often treatable with modern medicine. However, these gents were either born before the medical treatments for their disease were available or they didn’t have access to them due to health disparities.

Read on for the fascinating intersection of medicine and sports, and most importantly, the inspiration that comes with three gentlemen who defied the odds health-wise and rose above their adversity to become professional football players in the NFL. For other less inspirational but similarly cool historical articles, look here. History matters – the accurate portrayal of history matters just as much.

NFL Legend #1: Kenny Washington – Los Angeles Rams, 1946-1948

Kenny Washington was the first player to have rickets as a child and play in the NFL as an adult.

Not So Legendary Childhood

Kenny Washington did not have an easy go in life.

The future NFL legend was born on August 31st, 1918, to Marian Lenàn and pro-baseball player Edgar “Blue” Washington. The couple split up when Kenny was two. Marian left her son when she left Edgar. Blue was frequently getting into trouble and was not a consistent presence in his son’s life.

Kenny had many adults in his life who loved him, but it would be difficult to not have either parent in your life. He was raised primarily by his grandma, Suzie Washington, his aunt Hazel, and his uncle Rocky, who was the first black cop in the LAPD.

Washington had five knee surgeries by the time he was 27 years old. Three of them were children. It’s a little murky, but it appears that he had two knee surgeries as a child due to rickets and one due to being run over by a car, which broke both of his knees.

It’s rare for children in America, even at that time, to require surgery due to rickets. The damage to Kenny’s knees must have been unusually bad. We’ll get into Rickets a bit more further on in the article.

Kenny was a teen with many talents. He was a baseball and football star who led both teams to the city championship one year. His nickname was “kingfish” from the radio show “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”

 

NFL Legend Goes to College, and Then the Pros

Kingfish would go on to be a UCLA Bruin, where they were much more liberal about desegregated teams than most. He was also on the gridiron and the diamond in his college days. The Bruins had four African-Americans on their team, a huge number considering there were only a few dozen in all of college football at the time.

It’s awkward to applaud the Bruins for doing the bare minimum (i.e., allowing African Americans to play at their university), but it was a time when many schools were viciously segregated, so UCLA gets a golf clap. Everyone else get’s a tush push of not-so-brotherly love.

Rumor has it that Washington was rated better than his teammate Jackie Robinson in college, but his future in baseball was not meant to be. Heaven only knows what attracted Kenny to football over baseball.

Instead of becoming a Chicago Bear like George Halas wanted, Kenny would stay in LA and also join the LAPD while playing semi-pro football for six seasons. At the end of his time with the Hollywood Bears, he would serve in the military for a year.

Before his first season in the NFL, he had his two last knee surgeries. Torn cartilage was taken out of his left knee, and a growth was removed from his right.

“The Forgotten Four”

Kenny Washington’s introduction into the league at 27 was particularly monumental. Black players had been unofficially officially banned from the NFL for 13 years, from 1933 to 1946.

Washington was one of the “forgotten four,” the four black players that broke the segregation in the league for the second time in its short history. Kenny Washington and Woody Strode played for the LA Rams, and Marion Motley and Bill Willis played for the Cleveland Browns.

Both Motley and Willis are in the NFL Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Integration was imposed on the LA Rams. When coming to Los Angeles from Cleveland, the Rams were forced to sign black players. With a heavy emphasis on the word forced. The Rams would not be allowed to come and play in the Coliseum if they didn’t integrate.

 

Mr. William Claire Harding, a former pro-baseball player and sports editor for the Los Angeles Tribune, made an argument for the integration that was required for the team that would settle in LA. His exact words are not recorded, but this is the summary of his argument:

The Coliseum was funded by public funds, and the stadium could never be used by a segregated team. He noted that blacks had served in World War II, that they had been key to much of the war preparation that had taken place in Los Angeles, that they had helped build and helped fund the Coliseum, and that it was “singularly strange” that no NFL team had signed a player like Kenny Washington.

Kenny’s In The NFL!

As a  result, Kenny Washington was signed. And his friend too. The Rams asked Washington to recommend a friend to sign, and Kenny immediately brought up Woody Strode.

Sometimes known as the “Jackie Robinson” of the NFL, Kenny Washington withstood a lot of racism. One example that may sum it up best was when the LA Rams and Washington team played, and the opponents pinned Washington down and rubbed chalk in his eyes on the field.

After dealing with all of that bull ish, Kenny Washington retires three seasons later. Post-retirement, Kenny worked for the LAPD again, dabbled with retail, was a scout for an MLB team, and even did some acting in movies.

And then he passed away at just 52 in Los Angeles, California, of heart and lung problems. It’s a hypothesis of the author that possibly rickets could have contributed to Kenny’s premature death. Bad cases of rickets, which he clearly had, can cause deformities in the chest region. This can cause breathing problems and chest pain. When rickets are bad enough, the health effects can last a lifetime.

Rickets or not, Washington passed away far too soon. His entry into the world was a difficult one, and life never got much easier. May this NFL legend be enshrined in the HOF at some point. His grandkids feel that is only fair.

#2 NFL Legend: Mac Speedie – Cleveland Browns, 1946-1952

Most people associate polio with the 1950s. But Mac Speedie was special. He got Polio in the 1920s, the beginning of the “Polio era.” The vaccine didn’t come until 1955, and the iron lung wasn’t even invented until 1927. It was a bad time to get polio. But Speedie not only recovered from the disease, he went on to play in the NFL.

Polio and Perthes Disease

Mac Curtis Speedie was born on January 12th, 1920, in Odell, Illinois. There’s not much detail about his family or childhood, except for his illnesses. We do know that he moved to Utah by the time he was a teen, playing football, basketball, and track in his Salt Lake City high school.

 

It was confusing because some sources indicated that he had polio and others indicated he had Perthes disease. But as the cookie crumbles, both can absolutely be true. That is the assumption we will be moving forward with.

Polio: poliomyelitis is caused by one of three polioviruses. 95–99% of cases are asymptomatic or result in a minor illness that passes in a week or two. 1–5% are what is called nonparalytic aseptic meningitis, which is similar to a bad stomach flu that won’t go away—body pain, fever, upset stomach, tiredness, and the like. The final kind, which is 0.1-0.5% of cases, is the kind we hear about often: paralytic polio.

Paralytic polio can affect the muscles anywhere in the body. Legs are the most commonly affected muscles. Paralysis can be fully reversed, partially reversed, or permanent, depending on the health of the nerve cells in the spinal cord.

This disease is highly contagious in two different ways: through mouth-to-mouth interactions between an infected and healthy person and through an infected person’s fecal matter coming into contact with someone’s mouth (usually by not washing hands properly). Most people will be totally fine, but 1-6 people out of 100 won’t be.

Mac Speedie was not fine. He had to wear leg braces for four years. Also, one leg was shorter than the other, which caused a limp. Polio can slow the growth of one leg and sometimes not the other, creating a limp.

Perthes Disease: Perthes is less predictable than polio. There’s no clear cause. It is interesting to note that Perthes is sometimes correlated with polio and rickets. This disease, like polio, affects almost exclusively children. Perthes is most common in 4–10-year old’s.

A disruption of blood flow to the head of the femoral joint in the hip (just the hip) is Perthes disease. The bone dies due to a lack of blood. The body heals by clearing out the dead bone. leading to a loss of bone mass and an overall weakening of the head of the bone.

The idea is to help support the affected hip, usually through the use of braces and other similar devices, while the disease rages. Once Perthes has run its course, the long-term effects are determined by the permanent damage done to the hip joint. This can also result in a limp.

Mac Speedie Recovers

Not even polio/Perthes disease could keep Mac Speedie down. As previously mentioned, he jumped into sports as soon as he jumped out of the braces. In his youth, this likely wasn’t particularly painful, but it wouldn’t take long to catch up to an ordinary individual. But Mac Speedie is an NFL legend, so the rules don’t apply to him the same.

A long-term effect of having different-length legs is pain in the back, knees, ankles, and other parts of the body that have to compensate for the height differential. That didn’t stop Mac, though. He was a football, basketball, and track star in college as well. He even served our country, even though a waiver would likely be attainable.

The (CFL?) and NFL Legend Goes Pro

Mac Speedie was on the Cleveland Browns team from 1946 to 1952. He was initially drafted by the Detroit Lions in 1942, but the franchise wouldn’t officially sign him until the war was over. That was fine with Speedie, but when he was courting football teams in 1945, he didn’t feel any loyalty to the Lions either.

After WWII, Mac almost entered the AAFC as a Chicago Rocket but was lured away by a new franchise known as the Cleveland Browns for the 1946 season with a $7,000 contract, more than double what the Lions offered him. The AAFC would merge with the NFL in 1950.

The Future Hall of Famer (enshrined in 2020) had just a few impressive stats. He was in the AAFC and then NFL Championship games (the precursors to the Super Bowl) six times in a row. He was a two-time pro bowler in the NFL in 1950 and 1952 and was named MVP in 1952.

Overall in Speedie’s career, he had 349 interceptions, 5602 yards, and 33 TDs as an end. And that was with polio/Perthes as a child, with a still noticeable limp. His teammate Dante Lavelli painted quite the picture with his words, saying Speedie had “an odd gait in which he could fake plays without even trying.”

Mac was a man who appreciated money, something the NFL wasn’t always offering much of, and so he went to the CFL in 1953. At the time, the Canadian Football League was trying to bring over big-name players to give their league some credence. He would stay in Canada through the 1955 season.

Post Football Days

Speedie’s days on the gridiron may have been over, but he wasn’t done with the league just yet. He tried his hand at coaching the AFL’s Houston Oilers as their end coach in 1960 and 1961. He would then be the end’s coach for the Denver Broncos from 1962 through some of the 1964 season. It is unclear exactly when, but Mac would switch to head coach for the Broncos during the 1964 season until 1966.

Coaching wasn’t necessarily Mr. Speedie’s calling, so he switched it up and started scouting for the Broncos, a job he kept until he retired in 1982.

Hall of Fame Controversy

The NFL legend never got along with his head coach, Paul Brown.

NFL Legend

Paul the skunk’s great, great-grandson spotted at a Browns game in 2022 (WKYC Channel 3/YouTube).

His run-in with the police just before the league championship game of his rookie season didn’t help. On a car ride to pick up Speedie’s wife at the airport, the driver of the car and teammate Jim Daniell got into a dispute with the cops after he honked his horn at a police officer who had blocked his way.

The ensuing confrontation and arrests left Daniell without a team, Speedie and another teammate charged with being disruptive, and several hours in the slammer.

Allegedly, many players felt Paul Brown was a domineering head coach. Speedie’s independent nature and free spirit didn’t sit well with the old-school coach. And that’s an old-school coach when all coaches were old-school. He must have been really something. His dislike for Speedie prompted him to pick on the end, according to teammates.

Speedie’s daughter described her dad’s relationship with the head coach as “spicy,” quite possibly the best descriptor ever. It got so bad that a skunk became involved. A skunk named Paul, as a matter of fact, Mac Speedie brought his new little pet to training camp, making sure to share his name with the head coach, something the man didn’t appreciate at all.

Mac always felt that his schism with Paul Brown affected his chances of getting into the HOF, especially when several of his teammates were enshrined. In 1991, Speedie did say that Brown threatened that he would get even with him when he left for the CFL in 1953.

This seems likely as Brown threatened to sue Speedie when he left in 1953, saying, “This was a case of jumping a contract, pure and simple, as this young man morally and ethically had a contract with us.” So was that on paper, or nah? Morals and ethics don’t work quite like a signature on paper does, Brown.

Paul the Skunk made the final decision, and Speedie was enshrined in 2020, seven years after he died. His family was elated that he finally knew where he belonged. His daughter recalls the day her dad’s name was called as one of the elected: “We woke up early and waited, and my husband, Rod, who is my dad’s biggest fan, reached over, and he patted me on the leg and said, ‘Honey, it was just an honor for him to get this far. And when they said ‘Mac Speedie,’ we yelled and jumped up. The windows were shaking in the house.”

Mac Speedie’s daughter and grandson were able to unveil Mac’s bust at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 2021.

The NFL legend is truly remarkable for overcoming polio/Perthes and Paul Brown’s threats. He is finally where he belongs – in the HOF.

NFL Legend

Mac Speedie’s daughter and grandson unveil his bronze bust at the Hall of Fame (Photo courtesy of Cleveland Browns).

NFL Legend #3: OJ Simpson – Buffalo Bills & San Francisco 49ers, 1969-1979

It goes without saying that OJ Simpson is a controversial character. Not all legends are legendary for all the right reasons. In the NFL, OJ Simpson was a legendary player. In the courtroom, he was legendary for all the wrong reasons. His tweets in recent years of legal advice and commentary on true crime could also be given that distinction, if for irony only.

Honoring OJ’s incredible talent on the field and the mountain of adversity he climbed over in his childhood to become the athlete he was is inspirational. That in no way justifies the things he was found guilty of and not guilty of, alike, later in life. People are multi-dimensional and frustratingly complex. But we are capable of being objective and distinguishing, and we will isolate OJ Simpson’s childhood and football career from his post-retirement transgressions.

The NFL Legend’s early days

Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco, CA, in 1947 to his mother, Eunice Simpson, and his father, Jimmy Lee Simpson. Eunice was a hospital administrator, and Jimmy Lee was a bank custodian and famous drag queen in San Francisco who died of AIDS in 1986.

The love between Eunice and Jimmy Lee fizzled out when OJ was just 5 years old, leaving Eunice to raise him and his three siblings alone.

Around the time that his father left, OJ had a rather late-onset case of rickets, according to some sources. In other sources, it is cited that he had rickets at the typical age and stopped wearing the casts when his father left. It is a condition most common in infants and toddlers, but either could be true. His mother was unable to pay for the surgery her son needed, so he wore braces for years and was bowlegged, pigeon-toed, with skinny legs his classmates described as “pencil pins”.

When rickets are bad enough to require surgery, it is a severe case of the condition. Typically, the disease’s effects are reversible when the underlying causes of the disease are treated; however, if left too long, the condition can create life-long effects. OJ Simpson is still a little bowlegged to this day.

The young boy allegedly thought his actual name was OJ until a teacher read his full name out in 3rd grade. To be fair, ignorance might be bliss on that one.

OJ Simpson got in trouble quite a bit as a young man. He lived in a housing project in a rough part of town, with a lack of parental guidance. His high school sweetheart and future first wife, Marguerite, said he was a really awful person as a teen when he was affiliated with a local gang and arrested three times before he graduated from high school. To which a person could ask her when OJ Simpson was not an awful person (allegedly).

Baseball player Willie Mays was a role model to OJ, so when he came to visit Simpson in the slammer, he changed the young man’s life. An important reminder about the importance of mentors for young people. The future NFL player graduated high school, barely. Education was never his strong suit. Just remember, kids, that only works when you are one of the best running backs to ever do it. And that’s not you.

Bowlegged, Pigeon-Toed Athletics 

 

Despite being an expert football player in high school with bowlegs and pigeon toes, the future football great had to go the JUCO route due to his poor grades, which not even a mother could love. He definitely didn’t want to go to Nam after a close friend died there, so he put pencil to paper enough to not fail. He also led the team to the Prune Bowl, which attracted colleges, helping the running back get into USC.

Before the running back transitioned from JUCO to USC, he also married his first wife, one of the few women who doesn’t think he was “real awful” every day of his life (allegedly). He would have his first three children after the couple joined together in holy matrimony in 1967.

Being a Trojan seemed to work well for Simpson. He won a little trophy called the Heisman in 1968. His head coach, John McKay, said, “Simpson was not only the greatest player I ever had—he was the greatest player anyone ever had.”

OJ also ran track for USC, breaking a world record in a sprint relay with three other runners. As they say, bowed legs are the fastest legs.

Pencil Pins Is In The NFL!

Simpson was drafted first overall in the AFL-NFL Common Draft of 1969. It’s not hard to believe knowing Orenthal James like America does, but he gave the Buffalo Bills a hard time, demanding the highest contract in professional sports history at the time and threatening he would go into acting if the franchise didn’t pay up. The team relented, paying the running back 650k over five years.

Buffalo Bills Days

Things were a little dicey for “The Juice” his first few years in the AFL. As we know, a terrible team and head coach can destroy the finest and brightest. Thank goodness the Bills franchise was good at hiring and firing. Three seasons and two head coaches later, the Bills hired Lou Saban (yes, that Lou Saban) in 1972.

Saban created a team with OJ at the center, and if there’s something that makes that man thrive, it’s being the center of attention. Simpson ran relentlessly with his opponent, Edgar Chandler, saying “O.J. had more yardage than Secretariat” by 1973. That was the same year The Juice was the first to break the 2000 rushing yard mark.

He made 1,000 rushing yards every season from 1974 to 1976.

Bar Brawl Sans The Bar

Between an injury that limited OJ Simpson’s ability to play in 1977 and his little scuffle with Patriots Mel Lunsford in 1976, he facilitated his trade to the 49ers in 1978. And by little scuffle, that is referring to a fight so bad that he and Lunsford were both ejected from the game, something that basically required decapitating your opponent in the insane days of 1970s football.

NFL Legend

An article depicting OJ Simpson and Mel Lunsford scuffle (Photo courtesy of patsfans.com).

Apparently Mel body slammed OJ, and the running back punched ol’ Mel. Lunsford wouldn’t take a hit sitting down, so he swung at Simpson. A teammate of Simpson’s jumped on Mel’s back. The Patriot, who moonlighted as the Hulk, bent down, flung OJ’s teammate over his back, and began swinging at the running back again.

Pretty soon everyone and their brother ended up in a pile on the field, attempting to facilitate the end of the fight. Both brawlers got the red card, and OJ Simpson was sent packing back to his home city.

It’s San Francisco Time!

OJ Simpson was “washed up,” as Joe Montana so tactfully eluded to in his Peacock documentary, by the time The Juice got to San Fran.

After two subpar seasons, Simpson hung up the cleats. But father time gets everyone, and OJ Simpson was one of the best to ever do it as a running back. He finished his career with over 2000 carries, over 11,000 yards, 61 TDs, over 2000 receiving yards, 14 receiving scores, and 203 receptions.

He also added to his trophy collection, making sure his Heisman was in good company. Simpson was enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 1985, the MVP in 1973, NFL Offensive Player of the Year in 1973, AP Athlete of the Year in 1973, the Burt Bell Award winner in 1973, a five-time pro-bowler, a five-time All-Pro, a member of the Buffalo Bills Wall of Fame, and an AFL All-Star in 1969.

Even Your Mother Knew Him

For those of us with mothers who don’t know what the acronym “NFL” stands for, actually knowing a former player was a big deal. But OJ Simpson was like that; he could cross barriers and was a lovable individual to a wide audience. Kind of like Marshawn Lynch in 2023.

Post-NFL, Simpson was an actor, especially well known for his airport Hertz Rent-A-Car commercials. And that all came to a crashing end when he was convicted of murder. But this article isn’t about that, so we’re just going to mostly skip right over that in this article.

Rickets Wins?

Between having rickets so bad he needed surgery as a kid and a long career in the NFL in one of the most contact-heavy positions on the field, OJ Simpson was toast physically before he was 50 years old. In his murder trial, a doctor for the defense, Robert Huizenga, testified to Simpson’s overall physical health in an effort to prove he didn’t have the physical capacity to kill both his ex-wife Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ronald Goldman that fateful night in 1994.

The extreme detail that Dr. Huizenga goes into for the court gives us a better picture of OJ Simpson’s post-NFL injuries than we have of most former players. It’s just worth pointing out to the good doctor that a player that was capable of playing 11 seasons in the NFL in one of the most punishing positions on the field likely could push through the pain to get the job done. Just saying… The average running back in 2023 has a career of 2.6 years, and the game is about 1000 times safer for a running back now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

But back to the rickets and the court testimony… Dr. Huizenga first saw OJ Simpson as a patient in June of 1994, after the murders. During the visit, the doctor took a thorough medical history for OJ as well as performed a thorough physical exam.

The doctor noted that OJ had rectal cancer in the past and was concerned about additional cancer due to a swollen lymph node (which ended up being benign). Simpson also had recurring night sweats leading up to the visit. Was he suffering from nightmares by chance?

OJ also had clubbed fingers, which is often attributed to lung conditions, something an individual with rickets is more predisposed to, as described in Kenny Washington’s case.

Swelling of the wrists, knees, and ankles is common in children with rickets. It’s of interest that many of OJ’s injuries were centralized in those locations. This isn’t out of the norm for a typical football player, but it is still noteworthy. OJ’s bowlegged stance from his rickets, which he still had as an adult, would cause unusual stress to his ankles and knees as his body attempted to compensate for his unique leg shape. Simpson had a wrist surgery in 1965 and had four knee surgeries on his left knee as of 1994.

The former running back also had swollen fingers that could be from fractures or from arthritis. It’s not unusual for former football players to have early-onset arthritis, and the unusual wear and tear due to skeletal differences from rickets likely didn’t help slow the process down.

Dr. Huizenga noted that The Juice did not have the typical range of motion in his wrist and elbow. His wrist, for example, should have a range of motion of 90 degrees, and he had 30-45 on a good day. He couldn’t fully extend his elbows, either.

The doctor reported that Simpson was limping on the day of the visit, a life-long effect of rickets for some, and a side effect of arthritis for some as well. Dr. Huizenga felt that OJ likely had bouts of arthritis that could be triggered. Some days he would limp, and other days he would run through airports and film exercise workouts for VCRs. It’s unclear how that works out, but we’ll trust the doctor on this one.

Oh, and OJ Simpson also had a ton of concussions. We couldn’t tell.

It’s possible that professional sports that will wreak havoc on the healthiest of individuals may not be ideal for someone who already had a childhood disease that created life-long skeletal damage. It truly is impressive, though! Maybe a more keen eye can see it, but when OJ Simpson got running on the field, it didn’t look like he had bowlegs or a limp.

 

So How About Those Rickets?

In the research behind this article, the history of rickets in America was fascinating.

We know today that rickets is more common in breast feeding babies since breast milk is not an effective way of transferring Vitamin D, dark-skinned babies, and infants that are indoors more. Rickets can also be seasonal, and regional.

Fascinatingly, rickets is becoming a bigger problems with the resurgence of breast feeding in recent times. Tell that to the mommy shamers. Formula is fortified with Vitamin D. This can be particularly problematic for certain cultures where children are exclusively breast fed for longer periods of times. In Nepal, a place where breastfeeding can be prolonged, there is a typical sunbathing technique where the baby is exposed to the sun for short durations of time during the day which provides needed vitamin D that they aren’t otherwise getting in their diets. We love to see it!

We do know that children with more melanin require a greater amount of sun to activate Vitamin D since melanin acts as a filter and absorbs solar rays. Seasons where there is less sun affect everyone, and in regions where there is hardly any sun (hello, Seattle! ), vitamin D deficiencies are more common.

History of Rickets

Back in the days of Kenny Washington and OJ Simpson, rickets was an “African American and Italian disease.” Which could confuse an author because these two groups didn’t seem to share a commonality that would explain why early epidemiologists would observe the disease this way.

Hint: racism, eugenics, and xenophobia. For a medical community that had just figured out what germs were, understanding that melanin affected how vitamin D was processed by the body was simply too much. Instead, it made more sense to assume it was inferior genes in African Americans that contributed to the high rates of rickets.

This is a good time to remind ourselves: history matters, and an accurate portrayal of history matters just as much.

It truly only gets worse from there, and this author doesn’t have the stomach to type out the rationale of the medical professional’s eugenic hypotheses. For the whole scoop on that, look here.

In a study in New York City in 1917, over 90% of African American babies were diagnosed with rickets. A similar rate of rickets was found in Italian populations. Why the Italians? There’s not a clear answer to that. Xenophobia seemed to really focus on Italians for some reason.

Angry mob surrounding the prison where 11 men would lose their lives (Photo courtesy of History.com).

As we know, in history, America didn’t know what to do with Italians. The Italians were considered a third, in-between race in society. They lived, worked, and attended school with African Americans in the highly segregated South. In quite possibly the biggest mass lynching in American history, 11 Italian individuals were lynched in one night in New Orleans in 1891 with no intervention from the police.

So… that’s why they got heavily diagnosed with rickets? Because people hated them due to their country of origin for illogical reasons? It appears to be so.

This disease actually inspired a lot of the social and health services that are offered today by social workers, public health professionals, and the medical community. Things like home visits, targeted health interventions in certain neighborhoods, and the idea of preventive medicine were all new. It’s just horrifically unfortunate how much ignorance informed these processes.

Oh, and once the highly subjective physical exams were replaced with x-ray exams to diagnose rickets, it was determined that many cases of rickets were overlooked in the richer, whiter babies, evening out the scales significantly in the New Haven Rickets Study conducted from 1923 to 1926.

Why is this important to this story? It’s just interesting to note how two African Americans, NFL legends to be, who were born and raised in the 1920s and 1940s in predominantly Italian and African American neighborhoods like Kenny Washington and OJ Simpson, respectively, would be up against society once again when it came to how they viewed their health problems and likely affected the medical care they received for their rickets.

As if being bowlegged and having broken knees aren’t bad enough without all this other garbage. Sorry, gentlemen, it was wrong, pure and simple. History matters, your stories matter, and I hope that I captured even a semblance of your experiences with some level of accuracy.

What They Don’t Have In Common

Unfortunately, despite these three NFL legends overcoming adversity in their own lives, society sometimes felt the need to add to it.

Mac Speedie and OJ Simpson were both enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but Kenny Washington has not. That is something all three should have. Kenny Washington was systematically overlooked for awards. When he was considered, he was given lower-level awards, and he had to work twice or three times as hard as his peers to get them.

That’s not to under-emphasize Mac Speedie’s contributions, who played at the same time in the league as Kenny, or imply OJ Simpson’s career was also not tainted by prejudice, but it is particularly obvious when it comes to Washington’s situation.

 

May Mac Speedie and Kenny Washington rest in peace.